“The saga of the Me Decade begins with one of those facts that is so big and so obvious...
that no one ever comments on it anymore...
Wartime spending in the United States in the 1940s touched off a boom that has continued for more than 30 years. It has pumped money into every class level of the population on a scale without parallel in any country in history..
.” So wrote Tom Wolfe in a once-famous essay that appeared in August 1976, just a few months before Jimmy Carter beat the Republican incumbent Gerald Ford by a hair and won the White House on a platform of explicitly Christian piety. Wolfe was characteristically hyperbolic – the country was still in a historic economic slump – but it was a fact that America was slowly making its way out of a grinding recession into the dawn of a new prosperity – for the upper classes, anyway.
The unbridled hedonism of the counterculture was being smoothly assimilated by a racing commercial culture, as once-subversive values – eg “if it feels good, do it” – became the motto for a lucrative new market: young people making their way from Woodstock to Urban Outfitters, Studio 54 and beyond. Just as disgust with woke coercions helped boost Trump back into power, revulsion against a new culture without limits helped make Jimmy Carter president. A lot is being said, as it should be, about Carter’s unabashed references to the Bible and to his evangelical Protestantism.
But what made Carter the right president at the right mom.